Watervogels

Once a land of indigenous and migratory birds, Bangladesh is witnessing rapid decline in the number of birds in recent years, conservationists say. In the country’s coastal belt and Sonadia island in particular, the population of birds, as suggested by their movement, came down to a half in a year. Countrywide, the number of birds as counted by their presence here and there, declined by 40,000 this year compared to a year before, according to a census.

Food sources for the bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) on its annual journey to Alaska have been depleted, but researchers have devised a plan to keep them fed. Godwits travel 17,000 km from the southern hemisphere to the north, and back every year. After leaving New Zealand in March, thousands of godwits have made it to China‘s Yalu Jiang National Nature reserve. However, after experiencing the coldest winter in almost half a century, clams at the mudflat have been dying off.

Recognisable by its black plumage and striking red beak, the Black Stork (Ciconia nigra) is found in low numbers all over the planet. European populations migrate to Sub-Saharan Africa in the winter and during the summer an estimated 470 pairs can be found in Spain, a large proportion of which are found in the north of Extremadura. They are threatened.

For many people in Hong Kong, talk of endangered species conjures up images of wildlife whose natural habitats are “out there”, somewhere far away – such as giant pandas in the bamboo forests of Sichuan province, polar bears in the Arctic and miniature monkeys in the Brazilian rainforest. If, like me, you are a birdwatcher, however, the list of threatened species feels far closer to home.

The blood parasites that infect songbirds with avian malaria are far more diverse in Southwest Michigan than scientists knew, raising troubling questions about the spread of the disease and its impact on dozens of species of birds in the Great Lakes region. "Parasitism is a widely occurring interaction that drives ecological and evolutionary processes and has profound impacts on biological systems,” according to a newly published study by scientists at Western Michigan University.

The haunting cry of the curlew (Numenius arquata) has long been embedded in Irish literary culture as well as in individual memory. Yet, with the breeding population dropping by a staggering 96 per cent since the 1980s, we are left to wonder whether Ireland’s future generations will have any more than these tales to rely on when learning about this iconic bird.

Over the past 20 years or so, Texas waterfowlers have witnessed - and waterfowl managers have documented and wrestled with - some dramatic shifts and trends in abundance and distribution of the ducks and geese that each autumn pour down the Central Flyway to winter in the state. That perspective is strikingly underscored by results of Texas' 2018 Mid-winter Waterfowl Survey. That aerial population survey, conducted in early January each year and covering all of the state except for the waterfowl-poor Edwards Plateau and Trans-Pecos ecological regions, produced some sobering findings.

The Asian Waterbird Census (AWC) 2018 conducted in Kollam district by the WWF-India, a conservation organisation, with the support of Social Forestry wing of Kerala forests and wildlife department has found a drastic fall of around 40 per cent in the total count of birds. The AWC held in nine different bird rich sites accorded a count of 5,697 birds belonging to 61 species in place of the previous year’s count of 9,378 from 65 species. The number of migratory bird species has also fallen to 22 from last year’s 32.

Nature preservation group BirdLife Finland reports that domestic populations of the endangered common pochard have decreased massively in the past two decades. BirdLife's calculations show that Finnish populations of the common pochard (Aythya ferina) have fallen a staggering 80 percent in the past 20 years. The organisation hopes to help revive the species by naming it the year's top bird.In the early 1970s the Kokemäki river delta in Satakunta was bustling with some 250 pairs of pochards. Local calculations from a few years ago put the figure at just 30.